On: Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully...

[chubot]

This is how the Oil blog is made: it's markdown in git, and it renders fine in Github.

I use a bunch of old Unix tools that will be around forever to make it look nice: http://www.oilshell.org/site.html

The toolchain has changed significantly in 4+ years. It started as literally a shell script invoking Gruber's original markdown.pl. Then I switched to CommonMark, etc.

But the core data hasn't "rotted" at all, which is good. Unix is data-centric, not code-centric.

Previous thread that mentions that Spolsky's blog (one of my favorites) "rotted" after 10+ years, even though it was built on his own CityDesk product (which was built on VB6 and Windows). He switched to WordPress. Not saying this is bad but just interesting. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25675869

[frenchy → chubot]

> The toolchain has changed significantly in 4+ years. It started as literally a shell script invoking Gruber's original markdown.pl. Then I switched to CommonMark, etc.

Wouldn't switching formats like that break peoples pages? That's one concern I have with using markdown for a site like this. For anything non-trivial, you either end up using HTML (in which case, what's the point) or some dielect-specific feature.

[chubot → frenchy]

CommonMark solves that problem! It's a precise standard for Markdown that multiple implementations are converging on (Pandoc, etc.)

CommonMark is a Useful, High-Quality Project http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2018/02/14.html

At the bottom of this article I note one incompatibility I encountered with the reference CommonMark vs. markdown.pl. But I just fixed those and have been using it for 3 years, and it's been great.

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The key point is to have a diversity of implementations, so you don't get locked into one, which may go away in 10-20 years. In 10-20 years, I'm very confident that there will be CommonMark renderers available.

(Even apart from the fact that the reference cmark implementation I use is extremely compact C with no dependencies. C will outlive Perl -- the Lindy effect at work! http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2021/01/philosophy-design.html#... )